I am a multidisciplinary community artist and designer. I also educate, advocate, research and innovate.
I am based in West London where I was born and raised and have lived for the past four decades.
I am inspired every day by the grassroots communities I live and work around. I do what I can to support them and I explore ways in which our lives can be improved, especially through self-organisation, participation and pushing boundaries.
On this site you will find some examples of what I do and what I am involved with.
I am based in West London where I was born and raised and have lived for the past four decades.
I am inspired every day by the grassroots communities I live and work around. I do what I can to support them and I explore ways in which our lives can be improved, especially through self-organisation, participation and pushing boundaries.
On this site you will find some examples of what I do and what I am involved with.
I have run a community arts group, Brownbaby, in North Kensington since 2007, I was a Portobello market trader for 8 years and I have held a variety of leadership positions with schools, grassroots groups and charities. Between 2015 and 2020 I supported four local campaigns to protect and enhance community assets, each of which led to significant changes and strengthened provision for our local communities.
My community practice includes a wide range of disciplines with a focus on techniques that enable individual participants efforts to be brought together into a larger whole. Since 2006 I have produced many group mosaics, public installations, exhibitions, magazines, screenprints, graphics and radio shows, working with hundreds of young people. I have designed and painted a number of bridges in North Kensington with public art charity Urban Eye, and produced the odd piece of street art. Since 2017 I have led creative community responses for Grenfell, including Green for Grenfell illuminations and the production of artworks across Notting Hill Carnival.
My community practice includes a wide range of disciplines with a focus on techniques that enable individual participants efforts to be brought together into a larger whole. Since 2006 I have produced many group mosaics, public installations, exhibitions, magazines, screenprints, graphics and radio shows, working with hundreds of young people. I have designed and painted a number of bridges in North Kensington with public art charity Urban Eye, and produced the odd piece of street art. Since 2017 I have led creative community responses for Grenfell, including Green for Grenfell illuminations and the production of artworks across Notting Hill Carnival.
My personal practice has mainly focused on print and cut paper and digital collage, exhibiting in libraries theatres and other accessible community spaces.
Community in its many manifestations remains at the heart of my creative thinking.
CONTACT - Get in touch via the contact page in the menu - send a good message and an email address and I will get back to you.
As well as my writing on behalf of the various campaigns and groups I have supported, here are a selection of other published pieces:
A peer-reviewed paper in which I collaborated with Pablo Sendra and Marco Picardi to write about grassroots community campaign groups in the North Kensington area, operating fifty years apart in the 1960s and 2010s.
The degree and importance of grassroots community action in West London still appears to me to be misunderstood or understimated, and at times disrespected. It is nothing less than an aspect of local culture. It is a part of what defines many people in the area, just as we may similarly be defined by our ethnic, religious or national heritage. We are surrounded by people, stories and organisations steeped in ground-up participation, organisation, mobilisation, development, rebellion, occupation, decision-making, social care, social support and social infrastructure
Reflections on Community Action, 2016
http://maxillaarchive.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Reflections-on-community-action-by-Toby-Laurent-Belson.pdf
http://maxillaarchive.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Reflections-on-community-action-by-Toby-Laurent-Belson.pdf
A short piece commissioned as part of the excellent Maxilla Archive (www.maxillaarchive.com). My attempt to describe some of the power of community - especially the relationship between people and place and why local authority decision-making and development can cause such trauma and distress.
I would argue that our natural state as natural human beings is to connect. We will connect to ourselves, to each other, to inanimate objects, to our homes and territories, to our streets and spaces. That appears to have been misunderstood or ignored by countless decades of imperialism, expansion, invasion, colonisation, occupation, dispossession, displacement and degradation of the things we (human beings across the world and across time) connect to and value. We live with the resulting transgenerational trauma.
Intermix - Black and White Doesn't Do The Trick, 2007
http://www.intermix.org.uk/academic/Toby%20Laurent%20Belson.asp
http://www.intermix.org.uk/academic/Toby%20Laurent%20Belson.asp
I wrote this in 2007 in response to a request for pieces that described the mixed race/mixed heritage/multiracial experience.
It still resonates in many conversations about Race and its ongoing effects on us as individuals, communities and societies. However, it also reminds me that these short pieces are incredibly limited on such a vast topic. I read it now and almost every line can be unpacked and expanded into its own piece with views and experiences that both support and contradict. Race, racism and racialisation require entire libraries, institutions and (more critically I believe) spaces of thought, scholarship, care and community to disentangle. After all, Race, racism and racialisation have been introduced and maintained by powerful and all-encompassing destructive mechanisms over many hundreds of years.
Another reflection is that I do consider myself to be (amongst other things) mixed heritage Black, but, that a defining characteristic of racialisation continues to be an internal and/or external instability or mutability of identity. With our younger selves especially in mind, we do/did not all have the benefit of a stable or immutable family home or community to protect us from that storm of discovering who we are.